A flight management system (FMS) is a planning and management tool for mission planning. Aircraft flying in national airspace (NAS) are required to be implemented with a standardized and certified FMS to fly routes shared with other air traffic. Currently, unmanned aerial systems (UAS), sometimes referred to as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), do not include FMSs onboard and do not have access for flying in national airspace.
Synchronization of control data between airborne and ground-based systems presents several challenges, including data bandwidth issues, loss of data issues, and on-time delivery of data issues. On traditional bus-connected avionics systems, synchronization of control data is handled by utilizing high bandwidth, low latency communication over directly coupled data busses; however, high bandwidth, low latency communication is difficult in UAS systems. For example, in UAS systems, systems are physically separated by large distances, and high latency is typical. Additionally, bandwidth is shared among multiple users, and only limited bandwidth slots are available for each UAS. Many current systems allocate higher bandwidth for mission/payload applications (such as video surveillance) than for control data and use the same radio for both payload and control. When there are greater numbers of vehicles in the airspace two things may happen: 1) they may share the same frequencies or at least the same general allocation of frequencies, which can results in less frequency (and hence less bandwidth) per user, and 2) a segregation of mission/payload data and control data.
Additionally, current UAS and optionally piloted vehicle (OPV) systems suffer from lost data links between a ground control station and the UAS/OPV. Wireless links (as opposed to local, wired, databuses) can necessitate more information for the system to manage instances of lost link that are not found in local, wired applications. More information can require checks for availability of communications, protocols for reliable communications, and contingency management. Such communications links are bi-directional between the ground and air, and either or both links have the potential to be lost. For example, asymmetric lost data links may include ground lost links, air lost links, and ground and air lost links. For ground lost links, a ground control station is unable to send flight plan modifications to an OPV or UAS, but the ground control station is still able to receive position and flight plan modifications from the OPV or UAS. For air lost links, an OPV or UAS is not able to send flight plan modifications or time-space-position-information (TSPI) to a ground control station, but the UAS or OPV is still able to receive flight plan modifications from the ground control station. For ground and air lost links, both of the OPV/UAS and the ground control station are not able to communicate flight plan modifications or position information between each other.